DVD Review: ‘The Guest’
★★☆☆☆ One era’s genre cinema becomes another generation’s cultural harvest. As the cycle repeats itself, the line between pastiche and revisionism becomes increasingly tenuous...
★★★☆☆ Set 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens were making incursions into the lands of the Neanderthals, Andrew Cumming’s horror thriller The Origin depicts a small tribe coming up against a malefic entity in unknown and inhospitable environs.
Returning for its 26th edition and with 2021’s Covid restrictions largely a thing of the past, Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) this year crowned Hilmar Oddsson’s Icelandic dark comedy Driving Mum as the 2022 Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Ahmad Bahrami for thriller The Wastetown.
The head of this year’s Venice jury Julianne Moore awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her profile of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family. It’s a brilliant, committed piece of activist cinema.
★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.
★★★☆☆ A man sits alone in a room with a notepad and begins to scribble down his own voiceover. He only writes on one page and seems to always be starting at the top. His thoughts will be meticulous and he will show a certain expertise. When he’s finished writing he will place the pen on the table, neatly aligned with the pad.
The Sarajevo Film Festival has a history of resilience, so it was hardly surprising to see it come back stronger than ever after two years of Covid restrictions. Founded in 1995, the festival is now the leading industry event in south-east Europe, showcasing the very best films from across the Balkan peninsula.
★★☆☆☆ One era’s genre cinema becomes another generation’s cultural harvest. As the cycle repeats itself, the line between pastiche and revisionism becomes increasingly tenuous...
★★☆☆☆ Angelina Jolie has stated that she has given up on acting and is now solely a director. If her sophomore effort Unbroken (2014)...
★★★☆☆ Strap on your sandals and unsheath your swords! Ridley Scott has cinematically traversed ancient Rome with Gladiator (2000) and the crusades with the...
Welcome to our rundown of the top ten films of 2014. To see the cinematic delights that comprised the rest of our top twenty,...
It’s that time of year where we brace ourselves for what’s to come. Yet before we say au revoir to 2014 the CineVue team...
★★☆☆☆ Not even the promise of sunshine can save the one-note exercise in musical adaptations that is Annie (2014). Helmed by Will Gluck (of...
★★★★★ A meditative, often gruelling slowburner which explores concepts of ‘home’, Tsai Ming-liang’s remarkable Stray Dogs (2013) seeks to investigate the poor’s right to...
★★★★★ There Will be Blood (2007) gave us the birth of American capitalism, The Master (2012) doused us in the uncertainty of post-war malaise...
★★★★☆ Since as far back as his third feature, 1997’s Ossos, the work of auteur Pedro Costa has frequently explored the troubled Lisbon district...
★★★☆☆ Respect is a funny old thing. In order to get a little, you also have to give a little. What Sacha Bennett’s sixth...